Iranian artist remembers Iraq, in another war

The advance of ISIS has rekindled memories of the bloody Iraq-Iran conflict in the late 1980s. The Tehran Bureau speaks to the visual artist who is reconstructing its fragmented narrative one object at a time

Iranians on the offensive in the desert inside Iraqi territory north and west of the Iraqi Zeid outpost, July 1982. AP Photo

As the ancient town of Dezful crumbled under Saddam Hussein’s terror bombings in the early 1980s, volunteering as an aid worker there meant digging bodies out from under the rubble. While boys as young as eleven left this besieged city in southwestern Iran’s Khuzestan province to fight on the front lines, others stayed behind to help emergency crews clear out the wreckage and salvage the remnants. After each offensive, the youngsters would cycle through the streets to figure out where the bombs had hit. They would first try and assess whether there was anyone alive to save. If not, “it became a matter of … well, basically digging. And if you saw what that meant to the loved ones who had been left alive, you would know it was no less important than helping the living.”

Over thirty years later, as the belligerence of the Islamic State (Isis) on the other side of the border rekindles Iranians’ memories of bloody conflict, Tehran Bureau spoke with a visual artist who is reconstructing the fragmented narrative of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The artist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was only a teenager when the war began. He spent four years as a volunteer in his native Dezful, and is still attempting to make sense of the limbs, bodies and shrapnel that passed through his hands during the Jang-e Tahmili, or the “Imposed War.”

“I had this fearlessness that allowed me to go out anywhere, dig up anything. I just wanted to help,” he says. “But now, it’s all very painful to remember. Before our encounter today, I had not spoken of it in years. No one had asked.”

Through his work, the artist strives to counter two dominant narratives that have taken root in the Iranian consciousness since the war’s end. One, a protected sacred image curated by the state, depicts patriots who fought to the death for the nascent Islamic republic. To seek martyrdom for the revolution was to seek glory, the doctrine goes. The second, opposing narrative views the war solely as a product of government propaganda - one that rewarded veterans and formed a post-war ruling elite to run the newly established Islamic state.

A man and child flee the scene of a 1982 bombing raid in Dezful, Iran. Photograph: Seifollah Samadian

The artist, who seeks to debunk both these viewpoints, seeks to bring lost memories to life by resurrecting the stories of soldiers, houses and various objects destroyed in the war. Now based in Tehran, he still makes frequent trips back to Dezful, a sleepy agricultural town on the eastern edge of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin. The city was once known as Shahr-e Ajor, The City of Bricks, for its elaborate use of brickwork in the facade of buildings. Remainders of ancient stone water mills still stand on the city’s Dez river, near an old bridge from the time of the Sassanids.

The region is known for its scorching summers, and locals typically take refuge in their basements to escape the mid-day heat. Photos of Dezful’s wartime devastation are rare, but one enduring image depicts the scene at the city’s ruined Jameh Mosque after a shelling. A group of soldiers on furlough had been in the basement taking baths when the bomb hit, the artist recalls. “We could only find body parts. When people died in Dezful’s deep basements, you literally took out pieces of pipes with human flesh around it. Fingers - we would find many of those.”

The Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980 when Iraq launched a full-scale airstrike against Iran’s air bases with fleets of Soviet MiG-21 and MiG-23 fighter aircrafts. Saddam Hussein’s army attacked without warning, hoping to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos within Iran, which lacked a coherent line of defense along its western border. By October of that year, Khorramshahr, an Iranian port city which borders Iraq on the Shatt Al-Arab river was entirely captured by Iraq.

Iraqi missiles began firing on civilian areas in Dezful, 170 miles from the siege and home to the most significant air base in the province, less than three weeks after the war began. By 1984, Dezful had been hit by 50 missiles, more than any city in the province. At the war’s end, non-combatant fatalities would increase to more than a thousand. Half of Dezful’s old quarters, which housed monuments from the Sassanid, Saljuq and Qajar periods, were leveled to the ground.

At the start of the war, the artist recalls, Iraq would target the city at 10am, 3pm and 5pm daily. During those years, the invisible assailant became a family fixture - “a wild, crazy man we were unfortunate enough to know. My mother might remark on how calm he seemed to feel that day, or wonder if he’d had lunch before he prepared for the afternoon bombing spree.”

The artist would often roam the city streets during such times on various self-assigned missions. “The city felt like a ghost town during those hours, which was a good thing,” he says. “People knew to stay indoors, and usually there were few fatalities.”

Despite his mother’s laments, he once crawled his way through the city center, passing a freshly decapitated man whose headless body briefly remained seated on a bicycle before collapsing to the ground. The artist’s aunt had long wanted an empty warhead to use as a flowerpot, and he was determined to find her one that day. “I found one in the canal and used a piece of cardboard to roll it back home,” he recalls. “It was scalding hot.”

The Iraqi bombardments would last longer during counteroffensives, sometimes up to 24 hours. The artist himself narrowly escaped death while working in a home appliance repair shop when a bomb hit. He recalls regaining consciousness in the ambulance and spotting a round object wrapped in a kuffiyah. Inside, he discovered the head of Maftouh, the caretaker of a nearby residential building. Bleeding and bruised, the artist rejected medical care and returned to the site of the shelling to look for more victims buried under the rubble.

Despite the daily carnage, Dezful residents faced the war with resilience, even humor. Despite the proximity of Iraqi forces, the city was never occupied, and became a model of civilian resistance. My own uncle’s home was demolished during a nighttime air raid in the early 1980s. Known for his well-groomed appearance and carefully ironed shirts, he emerged from the wreckage bloody and bruised. When his neighbors spotted him and inquired about his tattered clothes, he replied: “I didn’t know that in Khomeini’s Iran, a man should wear a suit and tie to bed so that he looks presentable if they find him dead the next morning.”

My uncle’s son was sixteen at the time, and left soon after the war began to fight on the nearby front lines. Parents in Dezful still tell stories of that summer in 1980, when teenagers and college boys went from enjoying cold river swims during the last days of summer vacation to fighting bloody battles in Khorramshahr as Iraqi forces occupied western Iran. Across the town, framed photographs of sons who never came home still hang over the front doors of countless houses. I asked the artist what it felt like, going from a carefree teenager to a boy who dug out bodies, overnight. “At the time, you didn’t think of it that way,” he replied. “Things just happened too fast.”

A long stretch of nameless graves lines Shahid Abad, the city’s “cemetery of martyrs” where unidentifiable body parts discovered in Dezful and nearby towns are buried. While the artist’s own collection of wartime mementos is less macabre, it too is an attempt to rescue dismembered pieces of the past from the flow of time. Throughout our conversation, he takes out old Persian cafe-style aluminum etchings he salvaged from destroyed quarters of the city, pausing to name the artist, the neighbourhood and the scene.

He’s in the middle of one such story when he suddenly stops and rummages under his desk to extract a package wrapped in a black plastic bag. His hands fall under the weight of an RPG-7 warhead - full but disabled. At the moment a bomb explodes, nothing else matters but the very essence of life and death, he says. Only after the rubble is cleared and the dust settles do you stare at what remains and realize the immensity of what has been lost.

“See how heavy it is?” he says, looking at the warhead. “Those boys ran for hours with it strapped to their shoulders.”